South Pacific sea levels – Best records show little or no rise?!

Are the small islands of the South Pacific in danger of disappearing, glug, under the waves of the rising ocean? Will thousands of poor inhabitants be forced to emigrate, as desperate refugees, to Australia and New Zealand? Has any of this got anything to do with man-made emissions of CO2?

By looking closely at the records, it turns out that the much advertised rising sea levels in the South Pacific depend on anomalous depressions of the ocean during 1997 and 1998 thanks to an El Nino and two tropical cyclones. The Science and Public Policy Institute has released a report by Vincent Gray which compares 12 Pacific Island records and shows that in many cases it’s these anomalies that set the trends… and if the anomaly is removed, sea levels appear to be more or less constant since the Seaframe measurements began around 1993.

Sea levels: The El Nino / tropical storm anomaly in 1997-1998 is clear. A long sustained rise is not.

Take the infamous Tuvalu for example. It’s sea level rise was reported as 5.7 mm/year back in 2008. Now it’s calculated as 3.7mm/year. But look at the Seaframe Graph – its flat. It is universally forecast to disappear by 2050. New Zealand has even agreed to accept the “inevitable” rush of refugees, yet the best records available show that sea levels have not risen at all since 1993. It’s not that it will take decades, or hundreds of years to submerge, there’s no reason to suppose it will submerge at all (asteroid strikes excepted). It’s a place that naturally is reshaped and reformed as the ocean moves sand from one part to another, and the corals shift and grow with the changes.

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Tuvalu sea levels show little trend.

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There may indeed be legitimate refugees from some areas, but it’s most likely due to subsidence, rather than sea-level rises.

ABSTRACT
The SEAFRAME sea-level study on 12 Pacific islands is the most comprehensive study of sea level and local climate ever carried out there. The sea level records obtained have all been assessed by the anonymous authors of the official reports as indicating positive trends in sea level over all 12 Pacific Islands involved since the study began in 1993 until the latest report in June 2010. In almost all cases the positive upward trends depend almost exclusively on the depression of the ocean in 1997 and 1998 caused by two tropical cyclones. If these and other similar disturbances are ignored, almost all of the islands have shown negligible change in sea level from 1993 to 2010, particularly after the installation of GPS levelling equipment in 2000.

One of the big problems with measuring sea-levels is that everything is in motion. The tides shift, the sand moves, and even the bedrock can subside. The Seaframe stations are state of the art, and regularly checked to compensate for all these changes.

The Seaframe equipment used to measure sea levels is carefully recalibrated every 18 months to take these factors into account.

Precise levelling of the height of the SEAFRAME sea level sensor relative to an array of land-based benchmarks is undertaken by Geosciences Australia every eighteen months where possible. The precision to which the survey must be performed is dependent on the distance Km (km) between the SEAFRAME sensor benchmark and the primary tide gauge benchmark (TGBM) and forms part of the project’s design specifications.

The people of Tuvalu are worried, and it appears, their anxiety and fears may simply be a product of those who want to draw attention to their own pet projects for their own selfish goals. Though the climate change fears have attracted some extra foreign aid to the country, how much of that filters through to the worried mums and dads, and how much just feeds the bureaucrats with their taxes?

We don’t want a mass migration but most people are worried for their kids. They see no future here in 50 years.

“If sea levels rise 0.5m in that time we won’t be entirely under water, but with king tides and storm surges we will be in severe trouble.”

The long-term future of Tuvalu as a viable nation is being considered by the Government.

The bottom line

No matter what was heating the Earth, sea levels would rise, the rise in and of itself tells us nothing about the cause of the warming. What’s amazing is that so much of our CO2 has been unleashed since 1993, yet at least in the South Pacific, it’s not clear that sea levels have risen.

Even if the planet has warmed by 0.7c since the end of the LIA and it was all caused by humans ( nonsense I know) there is bugger all we can do about it.

China, India and the developing world will account for 75% of the increase in co2 emissions in the next 50 years, so all of the first world could retire and live in caves and it wouldn’t alter the temp or SL rise in the slightest.( I don’t believe in CAGW at all BTW. )

NZ has just brought in an ETS or similar nonsense and they only produce 0.1% of co2 emissions, add Australia and combined we only produce about 1.4%.

That 1.4% will be replaced by the developing world in a matter of six to twelve months, how stupid is NZ’s sarifice.

What I don’t get is why 1998 shows up as the hottest year in all the “global temperature” data (like GISS, etc) but it shows as an exceptionally low year for seal level on all these islands. If sea level correlates with temperature, shouldn’t 1998 be UP in all the graphs above?

The quote is attributed to Kurt Lambeck, immediate past president of the Australian Academy of Science. The article title apparently “expresses for the first time the consensus among Australia’s top climate scientists on the evidence for human-caused global warming.”

The consensus aspect is obviously contentious but it was the “beyond dispute” element that drew my attention.

Being from NZ where the Court will soon become involved in the debate (but cognisant of the ETS) and given the US Supreme Court judgment re the EPA “CO2 is an endangerment to humans” finding despite presentation of evidence to the contrary (the NZ ETS being an Act of Parliament and therefore legal endorsement of same), it seems to me that the “beyond dispute” notion must be eradicated in order to have evidence such as this sea level rise assessment taken into consideration at govt. policy level – anywhere.

The Courts are the adjudicator in the climate change debate (like it or not) and in the US and NZ already, the supposed “principle” has had traction. If NZ’s NIWA must be taken to Court to achieve an honest temperature record (success not guaranteed), then the “principle” may also need Court adjudication to have the “beyond dispute” element removed (success not guaranteed) because normal reason has been abandoned.

Under the “principle”, the sea level is in fact rising; it is “beyond dispute”.

I don’t have the figures but as a former fisherman and fishmonger that relied on accurate tidal measurements in the NWest, high tides in Broome were at their highest in the past 25 years about 20 years ago (+9.7m). They are now 10cm or so lower during spring tides than over that same period. Lowest tides were a couple of years ago, about 10cm lower during spring tides (-0.7m). This probably could be attributed to lunar/earth orbital factors.
Only cyclones have caused higher tides in the same period. The factory building is only about 10 cm above the highest spring tides, so any increase above this would have been noticeable with our 10 meter tides.

Picking out “years with zero trend” is, well, cherry picking (except for Tuvalu, where all the available data was used). Now if the article is to be believed, the IPCC estimates of the rate of sea-level increase is dodgy because they chose 97/98 as their starting point. So both sides are cherry picking?

Atmospheric pressure and ocean currents seem important factors in sea-level, and I wonder if any shift in weather patterns has changed the average atmospheric pressure over the ocean in this part of the world. Perhaps, like temperatures in mainland USA, sea levels to the immediate north east of Australia are a local rather than a global phenomena.

Are the Carteret Islanders still being evacuated to Bougainville? And is this because of catastrophic rising sea levels or attacking polar bears?

Bruce, since the Carterets are near PNG and the sea doesn’t appear to be rising there, perhaps they are being inundated due to subsidence?

And Tel, I understand that El Nino years involve a reduction in the prevailing winds – hence water “slops” back across the ocean as the winds slow down. It seems the latest El Nino wasn’t as strong as the one in 98. But I am not sure about the mechanism behind tropical cyclones causing a depression.

NZ has just brought in an ETS or similar nonsense and they only produce 0.1% of co2 emissions

New Zealand has had a limited ETS since 2008 – but it only included forestry, so it only generated credits. These were promptly exported.

Legislation for the full ETS was passed in November of last year, and it started to take effect on the first of July this year. It was supposed to dovetail into the Australian legislation.

However, Australia have delayed their ETS legislation, for fear that it would not get past the Senate. This is the same problem that Obama has in the US.

Australia is going to the polls this weekend, and one result might be an increase in the number of Green seats in the Senate. In which case, ETS legislation would have more chance of being introduced to Parliament in the near future.

Similarly, Obama is working hard to increase the Democrat majority in the Senate so that he has a better chance of getting ETS legislation passed. If that happens, we will wait and watch, to see it there is a constitutional challenge in the Supreme Court.

But anyway, New Zealand has an ETS that is designed to work with an Australian ETS that has gone AWOL, so New Zealand now has the dubious honour of being the only mandatory, economy-wide scheme outside of Europe.

But as Neville implies, nobody in the rest of the world is likely to notice.

“By looking closely at the records, it turns out that the much advertised rising sea levels in the South Pacific depend on anomalous depressions of the ocean during 1997 and 1998 thanks to an El Nino and two tropical cyclones.”

Damn thats interesting. Does anyone have a good explanation or a reasonable hunch about this? A sudden depression hey? So is this analogous to a a change from latent thermal energy, to actual thermal energy? Like in the sense that a lot of the energy, which could express itself as higher temperature, expresses instead in terms of thermal expansion? And when things go the other way you get a depression and release of thermal energy?

Its something to look at anyway these depressions, as small as they might seem on the surface. I suppose one has to go back and review some of Joannes other threads to do with El Nino, and then see if one can make some sort of sense of it.

If those stoooopid islanders wish to look after their islands, first they must stop catching 1000’s of parrot fish for western aquariums. That’ll stop the islands “sinking”.

I don’t quite follow. If they want to stop coral depletion (i.e. sinking), surely they need to catch more parrot fish, so less coral is eaten?

Anyway, a colleague of mine (a marine biologist) has pointed out that most “tropical” pacific islands and atolls consist of a layer of sand and pulverised coral on top of a “solid” coral base. The sand gets there, carried by wave and tidal action.

The base is constantly being refreshed by living coral (leaving the parrot fish aside for the moment, on account of them all being on holiday in western aquariums).

So if sea levels rise, the coral would be able to grow higher, thus maintaining the relative height of the island or atoll above sea level. However, if sea levels fall, the coral near the surface dies, and the exposed skeletons get pulverised by the actions of sand and sea.

His point, in all this, was that any rise in sea level would have to progress faster than the natural life cycle of the coral (which varies by species) for the dry land area to be impacted.

Bryan: You attended the Copenhagen conference as a lobbyist for Tuvalu. What were your impressions?

John: I prefer to be known as an advocate, hero and champion of the Tuvalu people thankyou Bryan.

Bryan: So what part of Tuvalu do you come from?

John: A little place called Queanbeyan, Bryan.

Bryan: A tiny island of the Tuvalu group?

John: A spiritual island, Bryan, geographically located near Canberra. On the Tuvalu side.

Bryan: But you’re familiar with Tuvalu – having seen it of course.

John: Lots of times Bryan. In the Pacific somewhere, [pulls out atlas], page 27 if I recall. Just…err… there. [Points to page.]

Bryan: So, despite your geographic isolation, you still feel a tremendous affinity with the people of Tuvalu?

John: An affinity that only money can buy Bryan.

Bryan: So John, as Tuvalu’s advocate, hero and champion at Copenhagen, what were your impressions of the UN climate change conference?

John: [Blubbering.] The people of Tuvalu were betrayed at Copenhagen Bryan! Shamelessly sold out by western capitalists, who heartlessly watch this island paradise sink beneath the waves!

Bryan: Because of rising sea levels due to man-made global warming ?

John: Yes Bryan. [Still blubbering]. The islands will drown, the culture will die and the
babies will perish – all because of western nations and their carbon emissions! [Blows nose.]

Bryan: So how can the western nations help?

John: Tuvalu urgently needs a large wall of money to hold back the floodwaters Bryan! [Loudly - to off-stage.] Can someone change these out please? [Studio technician comes from stage left, removes 2 buckets of “tears’ and replaces them with 2 new buckets.]

Bryan: Does it surprise you, John, to discover that the sea level around the entire world, which includes Tuvalu, has risen by an average rate of nearly 200 millimetres per century for the last 8000 years?

John: Impossible Bryan! We all know that mankind’s activities are causing rising sea levels! The IPCC said so – I’ll bet that report hasn’t been peer reviewed…

Bryan: The IPCC also said the Himalayan glaciers had a use-by date of Tuesday. And no, the report hasn’t been reviewed by people who are paid to agree with it. But it does say that the islands of Tuvalu rise and fall with sea level.

Bryan: Not in the normal sense, John, but when coral islands get too much higher than sea level, they are eroded by the wind. And when sea levels rise, they rise with it. That’s why these islands have been around for donkeys.

John: Totally wrong Bryan! Totally wrong! If Tuvalu is a coral island, the only growth will happen below the water line!

Bryan: But the upper section, technically known as the dry bit, is made up of sand. And do you know where that sand comes from?

John: It’s just sand…

Bryan: Ever heard of a parrot fish?

John: Delicious Bryan! And dead easy to catch. All you do is grab a torch, walk out onto the reef at night and pick them up while they’re asleep. Used to get whole bags of the suckers a few years ago…

Bryan: So the parrot fish is a popular Tuvalese delicacy?

John: National cuisine Bryan!

Bryan: Did you realise that the average parrot fish, through the simple process of feeding, converts about 100 kilograms of coral reef into sand per year?

John: The Bastards – I never knew that! Destroying the reef!

Bryan: Which promptly re-grows. But by that self-same process, the parrot fish generates about a 100 kilograms of Tuvalu beach to replace the sand that is blown away.

John: That’s marvelous Bryan! So when do we get the money to buy more parrot fish?

Bryan: Perhaps you could stop killing the ones you’ve already got? Try catching the other fish, maybe? The ones that aren’t parrot fish, for instance?

John: Love to Bryan, but the other fish are tricky. They move.

Bryan: Really…

John: Tell you what. Why don’t you help the Tuvalese people to modify their behaviour by enticing them with large bags of money?

Bryan: The noble savage. And if we don’t?

John: It’ll be on your conscience Bryan.

Bryan: That sea levels will suddenly continue to rise by 1.8 millimetres per year just like did for the previous 8000 years? Dearie me.

John: [Desperately] There’s not a moment to lose! Urgent action is required now! Send your donations to this address! [Points to bottom of screen.]

Good post Jo, but how do we get this stuff in the popular press? We can’t even get ABC The Drum Unleashed blog site to publish our posts. Here was my last effort to get a post published at the ABC site – of course it didn’t see the light of day.

“I have submitted three comments critical of Lewandowsky’s facts and logic, and a comment in response to ‘Damnthematrix’s’ list of record temperatures, and all have been censored and have failed to appear even in an edited form. I am trying again with one small point. Why hasn’t the ABC reported on the admission by NOAA that their satellite global temperature data has been faulty, in one case recording a surface temperature as high as 604 Deg F? Why has the ABC not reported the comments by leading climate scientists which call into question the validity of temperature records over the last 30 years and the research papers and IPCC reports upon which those temperature records were based? For details see: http://climaterealists.com/attachments/ftp/TopClimateScientistsSpeakout.pdf”

I also sent Lewandowsky my critique of his article inviting him to tell me where I am wrong. No response from him. If climate alarmists are so sure that they are on the side of science, why are they so reluctant to engage in proper debate?

Jaymez@26: Maybe they won’t publish your comment because the satellite temperature “error” is a non-story. Its a beat-up.

Mind you, if you look at the UAH satellite temperatures, surely they can’t really be as high as they seem! They have 2010 being way hotter than any previous year, and while its true that large chunks of the US, Asia and Russia have been very hot, one has to wonder if temperatures can really be as high as they say they are. You can plot their data yourself – go to http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/.

Note that this is maintained by Roy Spencer – who is basically on your side, except that he does believe in the greenhouse effect. He just doesn’t believe that positive feedbacks will amplify any CO2 induced warming. Roy has dropped the faulty satellite data in 2006 (thanks for your link to the climaterealists post on this), and RSS must have as well, because if you go to the woodfortrees website, you will find that UAH and RSS satellite temperature records are in good agreement. Interestingly both of the satellite records are going up way faster than the hadcrut3gl data.

So where is all the water going? The Warmists have shown warming (they say), they now universally talk about how most of the energy is in the oceans (that is why the surface temps. have not risen as predicted). This, if true, would cause the ocean water to expand and levels would HAVE to rise. Additionally, the Warmist continue to remind that the Arctic has melted which also should be causing a rise.

Years ago in, say year 10 to 12, classes it was taught that land rose and fell in lots of places and at differing rates. I know the data above is more recent but it was well recognised that early attempts to record sea levels failed because of poor or impossible means of ensuring the position of the site didn’t rise or fall of its own accord. Thus, anything up to circa 1990 should be tossed out the window. Amazing to see islands that were easily accessed from the mainland at low tide centuries ago can still be reached the same way.

Regarding the “science is settled” cliche. It was settled that the universe was heliocentric. Newton’s laws were final until Einstein bent them (excuse the pun.) His theories were upset by quantum physics which, although he helped develop them, hated them. This has led to such projects as the LHC in Europe. Hard core physics needing $billions and thousands of scientists to work on such projects would not be needed if such science was “settled”. NO science is ever settled.

The theory of relativity removed certain assumptions about the physical world that could not be true if Galilean transformations were not covariant but transformations that left Maxwell’s equations were. That’s all it did.

His theories were upset by quantum physics which, although he helped develop them, hated them.

There’s nothing in relativity that was upset by “quantum physics” or anything else, any more than laws of conservation that apply to a “continuum” are “upset” by some atomistic theory of matter. Einstein pointed out certain (apparent) paradoxes in quantum interpretation, that as he believed at the time, could not be answered in the framework of quantum physics as it stood. It’s probably true that some of the paradoxes cannot be removed in any formalism of it.

I don’t think he “hated” quantum physics because the paradoxes appeared

Tel:
August 18th, 2010 at 5:15 pm
What I don’t get is why 1998 shows up as the hottest year in all the “global temperature” data (like GISS, etc) but it shows as an exceptionally low year for seal level on all these islands. If sea level correlates with temperature, shouldn’t 1998 be UP in all the graphs above?

Mark D.:
August 19th, 2010 at 1:31 am
More evidence that GW is NOT having the expected effect.

John @ 27. How do you call the satellite issue a non story , a beat up ? In case you did not read the link from Jaymez , it has been shown there are a several problem satelites not just the one satelite mentioned in the first report.

Jaymez@26: Your frustration at not being able to get these reports into the MSM reminds me of a comment at WUWT on the same situation when Climategate was breaking – “The only thing that stands between us and totalitarianism is the internet”.

It is the “principle” in action (see 9 above).

Perhaps you should modify the tone of your protest. Witness this attempt at channeling Churchill by Prof. Kieth Hunter in response to the NZCSCET v. NIWA case:

My gut reaction (pretty scientific huh) is that even if water were dissolved into rock (or any other subterranean substance) the pressure causing this would be as stable as the our gravity. I also doubt that a few millibars of atmospheric variation would have much effect since the pressures at depth are already astronomical.

Now if you have ideas that steric sea level rise is impossible I’d like to hear about it. In the mean time the whole concept of sea level is one of the only things I believe we might measure with any hope of accuracy. (as opposed to global atmospheric temperature) A lack of ocean level rise easily and simply proves that CAGW, AGW and GW is not happening!

Or else a warmist should tell me where all the GW caused ocean expansion is hiding?

Well that’s a good point Sliggy the max in density of sea water occurs at the fp of sea water of some -1.8 deg.C.

Ice that appears at the surface of sea water of course is less concentrated in salt than the sea water itself (typically), because of the adverse diffusion gradient of salt to the ice arising from water ice crystal formation. Year to year this makes new ice easier to form at the surface because the surface layers formed from melted ice are less concentrated in salt, but over the long term, the colder waters of the ocean depths are replacing the surface waters. These are more dense than the surface waters they replace and evidently over the long term, the volume of water of the ocean doesn’t expand as expected

Mark D.:
August 19th, 2010 at 7:39 am
“…the pressure causing this would be as stable as the our gravity.”

Give or take momentum.
Picture this: A slow AGW type change will have no momentum effect. A rapid upward (or outward thinking spherically)movement due to solar induced expansion would cause a pressure increase as it expands because of the outward movement making the expansion lopsided( Air moving away from planet). This pressure would return to normal as the expansion stops then become a reduction in pressure as the contraction occurs. Again it would return to normal as the contraction stops.
Take another look at the sea level charts above. The 1998 levels seem to go down just BEFORE the temps peak here:http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt

Brian G Valentine,
But the two theories of relativity did indeed have a huge impact upon Newton’s laws as being seen as immutable. For example, the mystery of the orbit for Mercury was never solved by Newton’s laws, but only by applying relativity. Einstein did initiate quantum physics with his discovery that light consists of photons as well as being a wave. It was for this that he received the Nobel Prize later in life. We also should give most credit to Plank, Heisenberg and Neils Bohr for taking quantum theory so far. Sure, using the word ‘hate’ was over the top. But despite the evidence Einstein found quantum theories hard to believe and described it as “God playing dice with the universe.” This, he found intolerable and believed a unified field theory would tie the issue up. As he himself said,
” I consider it quite possible that physics cannot be based on the field concept, i.e., on continuous structures. In that case, nothing remains of my entire castle in the air, gravitation theory included, [and of] the rest of modern physics.” (Albert Einstein, 1954)

“BTW, happily I am able to access this site via one of the ISP’s that don’t block it here in Fiji. WUWT is considered by some (not the Government) to be a “threat” and is on the “blacklist of the company”.”

True the advance of perihelion of the orbit of Mercury of some 43 seconds of arc per century was only partly accounted for by the secular variations mostly of Venus and only accounted for by relativity. There remain secular variations in the eccentricity of Mercury’s orbit unaccounted for by anything, that’s another matter.

Einstein’s theory modified the Newtonian field so that the components of a gravitational potential of free space would account for apparent mass increase and time dilation. Those are consequences of a constant light speed.

It so happens that Mercury’s orbit is close enough to the Sun (Mercury’s angular speed sufficiently high) and the orbit eccentric enough so that the effect of time dilation can be perceived (as a secular variation on the orbit).

Anyway his “paradoxes” such as the Einstein Poldowsky Rosen paradox go away – when probabilities are interpreted correctly. All physics involve measurements, and all measurements involve probabilities, it just so happens these probabilities are handled a Little differently in the sub-atomic world. I don’t think Einstein believed the existence of a Planck quantum of action contradicted a thing.

Good mythbusting article, and it’s high time this furphy about disappearing islands was laid to rest.

Even if there was any long-term increase in sea level relative to the ocean floor, we’d expect it to be balanced by growth of coral and the subsequent production of more sand and soil by weathering and ecosystem processes on the islands. “Ever since Darwin”, it’s been known that this is how coral islands adjust to subsidence or sea level changes on the timescales that these changes actually occur.

Note that the new PM is promising to bring the ETS back onto the table:

“She also indicated she would revive the Government’s climate change policy after the Government’s decision to shelve its emissions trading scheme was seen as a major contributor to the dive in Mr Rudd’s popularity.”

Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill 2009…….

Everybody should read the section regarding “Monitoring powers”!!

This should be enough to send chills up and down your spine if you value FREEDOM!!

This ETS(Employment Termination Scheme/Extra Tax System)/carbon tax/CPRS CANNOT BE ALLOWED TO BE INTRODUCED INTO AUSTRALIA!

CJames, I suppose that you have an explanation why your link shows nearly 50mm rise during the same time period that these “cherry picked” sites show virtually NONE?

I should think that land based measurements are more accurate than satellite derived as they do not need nearly as much “correction” http://sealevel.colorado.edu/documents.php At any rate, I don’t think you can write off the fact that these sites are not picking up a trend of rise and that should cause some discomfort.

Excerpt
“One of his most shocking discoveries was why the IPCC has been able to show sea levels rising by 2.3mm a year. Until 2003, even its own satellite-based evidence showed no upward trend. But suddenly the graph tilted upwards because the IPCC’s favoured experts had drawn on the finding of a single tide-gauge in Hong Kong harbour showing a 2.3mm rise. The entire global sea-level projection was then adjusted upwards by a “corrective factor” of 2.3mm, because, as the IPCC scientists admitted, they “needed to show a trend”.’

#58. ETS and CPRS… I know the labels are misleading in relation to links with CO2, but could this really be a subtle strategy shift for governments to ‘find’ more funds/cash? It really could be called an ENERGY’ tax.?! This would mean an alternative from Mr/Mrs Citizen being the revenue source. After all, its obvious that big business has the cash and with aging populations, scare campaigns on immigration, where can the money come from within a growth focused/anti-depreciation based society?

Maybe an “Enegry tax”, as I call it can work, assuming one of the major roles of ANY government is to re-distrubute cash from those that have it, to those without it.

John #27, not sure if you wrote tongue in cheek. You could hardly describe the NOAA satellite errors as a ‘Beat Up’. These satellites are supposed to be providing the most accurate temperature and other atmospheric records available to us. Scientists have based research and conclusions on the data produced. The IPCC reports and government policies are influenced by the data. At first NOAA tried to claim there was no problem, now we know at least 5 satellites have problems. We also know that NOAA have known about the problems for years, but did not say or do anything. NOAA have not audited the impact of the errors on the temperature records they have been providing to government and non-government bodies.

Richard C # 36. I understand your point regarding ‘tone’. Though ‘tone’ might attract some editing, it shouldn’t attract complete censorship. However, the ‘tone’ in that last effort to get published only developed after having 4 previous posts totally censored. I assure you, there was no negative tone, unless stating Lewandowsky was wrong in fact and logic, is a nasty tone?

The fact is, the ABC soldiers are deciding what they want their readers to access. If it is information which shows how weak the AGW position is, it doesn’t get published. But if it’s a fairy story about Siamese twins and fun cars, it gets published.

Yes that is right, this is what Dr. Nils-Axel Morner has been saying for years. He has actually been visiting these locations, and has decried the computer modellers who have been reporting otherwise from their armchairs.

See many more relevant videos at that website. See live coverage of Australian Elections on a special page which will be available for the duration. Reach the special Aussie page from the Main Index page.

Months ago GetUp! promised to update its list of Labor promises broken. Must have been hard work, because just when we’re asked to judge Labor’s performance before casting our vote, this Labor front still begs for more time:

This site list of promises made by Kevin Rudd during the 07 election campaign.

But right now our team is working at updating the content.

We’ll have the content back online asap.

What’s more, the list of Labor’s promises has been taken down, so you can’t check them for yourself.

============================================

HERE IS A LIST OF “SOME” OF THEM TO HELP THEM OUT!

Find below Kevin’s/Labor’s Report card for 2008, 2009 and 2010.

Mark of F +++

• Save the whales – FAIL+

• Fuelwatch, $21M – FAIL+

• Kids Laptops – FAIL+

• National Broadband Network ($4b-$7B-$43B): To cost about $20,000 a connection – FAIL+

“Maybe finally the mainstream scientists of this country are waking up to what the NZ*C*S*C is trying to do. Let there be no doubt – this is another attack on integrity [sic] of the science system. We defeated this when the Nazis did it, we defeated it when the Soviets did it, and we will continue to defeat it! And in case you think it [sic], let me remind you – all it takes for scientific untruths to survive is for honest men and women to ignore them.”

why is this published as is? how many of these searches were by people following Climategate, e.g.? why did the herald-sun even publish it? no other MSM has so far carried it, tho ABC will probably jump on it asap:

1 Feb 2009: UK Independent: Parched: Australia faces collapse as climate change kicks in
Geoffrey Lean and Kathy Marks report on the worst heatwave in the country’s history
More than 20 people have died from the heat, mainly in Adelaide. Trees in Melbourne’s parks are dropping leaves to survive, and residents at one of the city’s nursing homes have started putting their clothes in the freezer…
As Professor David Karoly, of the University of Melbourne, said last week: “The heat is unusual, but it will become much more like the normal experience in 10 to 20 years.”http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/parched-australia-faces-collapse-as-climate-change-kicks-in-1522529.html

Brian@47: “Einstein Poldowsky Rosen paradox go away”; that is sad news; entanglement promised instantaneous long distance communication, quantum computers and superposition FTL travel; I suppose you’ll be telling that there is no such thing as negative energy now! You may be interested or even know of Anton Zeilinger’s 1999 experiment which showed that a 60 carbon atom buckyball can superposition but only in isolation otherwise it would decohere; I believe he is going to repeat the experiment with a cat.

Brian G Valentine, I know it seems we have gone well off topic, but my initial point was that no scientist or scientific group can be so stupid as to claim science is settled even in their own specialist area. I forget who it was but around 1900 at a science gathering someone pompously proclaimed that there was no more major science discoveries to he made except for a few more accurate measurements. This was when it was thought the sun was a ball of burning coal, atoms were poorly understood and the idea of galaxies yet to revealed. When Darwin saw the different finches with differing beaks on the Galapagos Islands he went on to develop the theory of evolution. (That’s not the whole story, but you know what I mean.) Today, we have ecologists popping up everywhere demanding and having different species declared endangered, etc. But the finches on the Galapagos Islands were just finches. Pure and simple. Each island contained the one species but with a slight adaptation. Today, too many animals of the same species, but with some different adaptation, are being named as separate species. So in many cases it does not matter if a so called species goes extinct because it probably is just an adaptation of common species found in abundance elsewhere. The Greens and environmentalists will just have to be more scientific about their judgement calls. Such calls can be unnecessary and oppressive to humans living their lives.

You see I would say that the statement contains a contradiction. Or at least loosely so. Because the essence of science is PROCESS. Methodology and process.

Substituting we see that the statement becomes”

“The Process And Methodology Has Settled”

Which is pretty confusing. The process and method can never settle down. But on the other hand the science is settled when it comes to CO2. CO2 is such a feeble warmer (cooler) we cannot find the evidence for these well-known allegations.

OK I’ll take your word it’s a crap theory – when you back that up and show me what it is supposed to be replaced with.

1. What transformation do you want to use to put Galilean transformations on the same footing as Maxwell’s equations. Nobody said Lorentz transformations are the only possible answer – but if you don’t like those, you need to show me which ones take their place. (Discussion over if you tell me you don’t like Maxwell’s equations, either.)

2. The components of the contracted (second-order) Riemann curvature tensor of empty space time, equal SOMETHING. You don’t like relativity means you don’t like the answer, “zero.” If they aren’t zero, tell me what they are.

Or else a warmist should tell me where all the GW caused ocean expansion is hiding?

Mark D. @37,

Remember the crazy woman on the House Select Committee on Environment and Climate Change who told Monkton that according to a gauge under the Golden Gate Bridge, sea level had risen 8 inches since that gauge was put in. So I guess it’s hiding under the Golden Gate Bridge. Or maybe whatever she was smoking is hiding there.

1. What transformation do you want to use to put Galilean transformations on the same footing as Maxwell’s equations. Nobody said Lorentz transformations are the only possible answer – but if you don’t like those, you need to show me which ones take their place. (Discussion over if you tell me you don’t like Maxwell’s equations, either.)

Not sure how this subject made it in here, but you might find this interesting:

Heinrich Hertz addressed what he saw as the problem that Maxwell’s equations weren’t Galilean invariant (invariant under an inertial transformation to a differently moving coordinate system) in his book “Electric Waves” (Teubner, Leipzig, 1892; Dover, New York, 1962) by simply replacing the partial time derivatives of the field quantities with total time derivatives (varying with spatial position as well as time).

This, astoundingly, makes Maxwell’s equations invariant under Galilean transformations, but introduces a mysterious velocity when transformed to differently-moving coordinates. Hertz hypothesized that this was the velocity w.r.t. the “luminiferous ether” and set about trying to measure it in the laboratory, which he failed to do. Hertz’s premature death signalled the end of this line of enquiry.

More recently, there has been some follow-up on Hertz’s observations. The most elaborate is by Navy physicist Thomas Phipps, in his interesting and wide-ranging book, “Heretical Verities: Mathematical Themes in Physical Description” (classic non-fiction library, Urbana; 1986). (He has some journal papers, also, which you can probably find by googleing him.)

Phipps introduces the operational definition of a “field” as “what is measured by a field meter”, and assigns the emergent velocity as the velocity of the field meter you are using to assign values to the fields. Phipps shows that this definition makes Hertz’s modification to Maxwell’s equations completely invariant and consistent over Galilean transformation, deduces a number of potentially measurable consequences, and designs and carries out a number of experiments to observe them. Some of these consequences (such as the non-existence of Thomas rotation) are verified — others remain elusive.

It’s understandable that there is so little support for the re-examination of “settled” theories, as many current theoretical works rest on them and are threatened by any modifications. This attitude surely lies behind some of the rigidity of climate scientists to any questioning of the basic tenets they assume.

I cannot resist! Here is a humorous comment that I recall from many years ago: As best I remember our Operations Officer ended a long-range aerial recon mission briefing early in 1955, from Guam, with, “Be careful, we have an excess of water out there.”

The problems with introducing an additive property into the speed of light give me a headache that I can’t deal with, when I contemplate all the consequences that go along with it (such as modifying the rest energy mc**2) – whether that additive property is assigned to an “aether” or to a physical thing.

This demonstrates to me how resistant I am to changing a belief or understanding I have had since I was a child.

I read Eddington’s semi-popular Space, time, gravitation at 11, Weyl’s Space, time, matter at 16 – I have carried with me (to this day) the impression that Einstein’s and Minkowski’s derivation of “special” relativity, was all there could be. Who knows, maybe I’m wrong along with all of them.

More related to the subject of this web site, I was told at 15 that Arrhenius was completely wrong about any idea he had related to “CO2 warming the atmosphere.” That wasn’t a common subject when I was 15 – and I never gave any thought to the idea that I would ever hear about it again. I was dead wrong about that, anyway.

So I hold two ideas in my head and indeed many more that I am very reluctant to modify in the slightest.

Rereke Whaakaro:
August 18th, 2010 at 8:52 pm
…
Similarly, Obama is working hard to increase the Democrat majority in the Senate so that he has a better chance of getting ETS legislation passed. If that happens, we will wait and watch, to see it there is a constitutional challenge in the Supreme Court.
______
Obama? Working? Hard? “increase Democrat majority in the Senate”?

What are you SMOKING, dude?

Obama is ineffectually scrambling to mitigate the coming slaughter of Dems both in Senate and House. He will fail.

“Rising ocean levels brought about by climate change have created a flood of unprecedented legal questions for small island nations and their neighbors.”

“The Carteret Islanders of Papua New Guinea could be some of the world’s first climate “refugees.”"

“”The prospect of a nation drowning is so horrific that it’s hard to imagine,” Gerrard said. Moreover, he added, until just a few years ago, it was difficult to have a conversation in the international community about how countries might adapt to climate change.”

Jo- thanks for some real data to combat this air-headed trash that eminates from the “Qld Climate Change Centre of Excellance” headed by our Premier’s “partner” -Greg Withers.(Dept budget $198M last Fin Year) This is hot off the press-

Sea-level rise predictions to increase
At the Climate Adaptation Futures Conference in July, Dr Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, Vice-Chairman
of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said that the IPCC will “almost inevitably”
make a large increase in predictions of world sea-level rises in its Fifth Assessment Report, due for
release in 2014
Research published after the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report largely suggests that global sealevel
rise will be greater than the projected 0.8 metres by 2100 stated in the report. This figure
includes a 0.2 metre component from ice melt.
The need for communities to adapt to rising sea levels was expressed by CSIRO researchers. Dr
Russell Gorddard, Nick Abel and Anthony Ryan called for planned retreat as an alternative to sea
walls in a paper delivered at the conference. They stated that a forecast 1.1 metre rise in sea levels
by the year 2100 will put at risk more than $60 billion in homes around Australia’s coastline, including
about 9000 in south east Queensland.
For further information on the conference, visit http://www.nccarf.edu.au/conference2010

At the Climate Adaptation Futures Conference in July, Dr Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, Vice-Chairman
of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said that the IPCC will “almost inevitably”
make a large increase in predictions of world sea-level rises in its Fifth Assessment Report, due for
release in 2014

I read Eddington’s semi-popular Space, time, gravitation at 11, Weyl’s Space, time, matter at 16 – I have carried with me (to this day) the impression that Einstein’s and Minkowski’s derivation of “special” relativity, was all there could be.